so doing may be committed to prison without bail or mainprize. And that no such license shall be granted before the party produces a certificate of his having received the sacrament according to the communion of the Church of England, in some parish church, within a year before obtaining such license, and hath subscribed the oaths of allegiance and supremacy.

"That if any person, having complied with these points, shall knowingly or willingly resort to any conventicle, or be present in any assembly where the Queen is not prayed for, should be liable to the penalty of this act, and from thenceforth be incapable to keep any seminary, or instruct any youth, as tutor or schoolmaster. And if any person teaches any other catechism than what is set forth in the Common Prayer, his license shall be thenceforth void; and he be liable to the penalties of the act; but no person to be punished twice for the same fact. Any person convicted by this act, conforming to the church for one year without having been present at any conventicle, shall be again capacitated.”

This bill met with great opposition in the Lords, many lords entering their protests against it; but yet it soon became law, and was to come into effect on the 1st of August, the day on which the Queen died. God's name be praised; this weak woman, this tool for mischief, was called to her rest; and the act was repealed as soon as her successor George I. came to the throne.

What is this but a Privy-Council scheme for educating dissenters' children into Church-of-England principles?" That no person in Great Britain and Wales, shall keep any public or private school or seminary, or teach or instruct youth, as tutor or schoolmaster, that has not first subscribed the declaration to conform to the Church of England; and has obtained license from the respective diocesan or ordinary of the place; or, upon failure of so doing, may be committed to prison without bail or mainprize."

We live in 1859, and Lord Derby is our prime minister, and he appoints the several diocesans or licensers of schoolmasters-he appoints what he likes, from the Dean of York upwards-he-he -the Earl of Derby holds the whole education of the country between his finger and thumb. Blood of Simon de Montfort! In

the face of Magna Charta; in the face of the Bill of Rights; in the face of the Protestant Dissenters of England-I ask: should this be so? In the reign of Charles II. and James II., no less than eight thousand Protestants were sacrificed-yes! they and their children were sacrificed for their principles-principles which drove James II. into exile, and caused him and his son to die paupers and pensioners upon the bounty of France; and yet Queen Anne, who owed her throne entirely from the compact of the glorious Revolution of 1688, can wipe out the feeling of gratitude to a free people; annihilate their rights and privileges; and place those rights and privileges in the hands of her prime minister! Disgraceful! By the betrayed blood of Sir Walter Raleigh; by the blood of John Hampden; of Algernon Sidney; and Lord William Russell-No! Lord Derby indeed! Lord Derby might edge off the odds on a horserace; or sell a favourite two days before the event, and get his head knuckled for doing it; but for Lord Derby, or any other prime minister of England, to hold the future destinies of England at the beck or nod of his patronage, is truly absurd; is truly insulting.

Mr. Bromley, one of the secretaries of state, offered to compomise the matter, by withdrawing this bill, if the dissenters would forego their privileges of voting for members of Parliament; and their privileges, too, of sitting in the House as members. This comes of allowing the executive to tamper with the education of the people; the principle is dangerous; and, if carried out, unconstitutional. Whenever we see a government attempting to shackle, by any means whatever, the vitality of Protestantism, we may rest assured that the whole machinery for enslaving the people is concealed somewhere near at hand. The pretence may be religion, or it may be education; but the reality will be found to be slavery, at the hands of priestly domination. It is one sect attempting to lord it over all other sects. It may be the Church sect, or the Quaker sect, or the Methodist sect, the Roman Catholic sect, or the Unitarian sect; Independent or Presbyterian; Adoniram or Muggletonian: call it by what name you like-there it is, and there it will remain; so long as the people of England allow it to remain. It is priestcraft all over: cant is its means, and oppression is its end.

It

While these plots against civil and religious liberty were being concocted in the Commons, under the name and pretence of education, a pamphlet appeared-"A Letter to the Dissenters. London, sold by John Morphew, near Stationers' Hall, 1715. Price 6d. 8vo:" a letter written against the Whigs for their neglect on the bill against occasional conformity. The object of this pamphlet was to prepare the dissenters for what they might expect, and also to warn them from trusting in the Whigs for real assistance. is not known who wrote this book; but common report at the time ascribed it to Daniel De Foe; and Oldmixon, who was a good judge of De Foe's movements-for he watched him narrowly with the eye of a Whig partisan and well-paid official-Oldmixon, in his "Remarks on the Letter to the Dissenters; by a Churchman; London, 1714; 8vo:" observes:-" It is very easy to discover that the author of the 'Letter to the Dissenters' is some inconsiderable wretch, that has sold both his principles and pen to a faction, enemies to the liberty of their country. I am ashamed to mark out the person on whom this libel is fathered: not so much on account of his being rendered infamous by law, as for the greater infamy he has loaded himself with, of late years, in the service of France and her friends." Old mixon was a well-fed and well-paid Whig partisan, or political runner; and of course looked up to the party as his paymasters; but De Foe stood higher, and looked upon the Whigs as I look upon the Three Tailors of Tooley Street-the self-styled people of England. De Foe knew the party of Whigs, and despised them. I have seen something of the party, after the lapse of one hundred and fifty years; and I have not an exalted opinion of the party. No? Why not? Lord John Russell's Church Reform Bill, which was a fraud--a fraud? Yes-dishonest; before God and man, I say, dishonest. A bad shilling passed for a good one, upon a confiding people! It was not necessary that Lord John Russell should give a reform in the Church of England; but, if he did give such a measure, that measure should have been honest; but it was not honest.

Well, again, when Cobden, Bright, Wilson, Rawson, and some hundreds more, stepped out from the ranks to carry the repeal of

the corn laws, how did certain Whig gentry and Whig M.P.'s act? May I say meanly and cowardly; in going before large constituencies of unbought and unbuyable Englishmen at the election time; and seizing upon the laurels of that victory which Richard Cobden and John Bright had won? Did Whigs do this? And am I right when I say that Whigs were mean, cowardly, and contemptible, when they did this? The Oldmixons of our days, the hired runners of party, may rail at the De Foes; but the act of cowardice remains. Richard Cobden and John Bright fought the battle; and you have had the meanness to assume the honours of the victory. Did many leading Whig politicians, aspiring statesmen, do this, on the cornlaw agitation?

On the 27th of July, 1714, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, was removed from his office of Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain. This was done through the intriguing of Bolingbroke and Mrs. Masham, the Queen's confidential friend; these two being especially interested, along with the Queen, in the success of the pretensions of the Pretender, to the exclusion of the pretensions of the house of Hanover to the throne, on the Queen's demise. This removal of the Lord Treasurer from office was accompanied with great confusion and loud contention in the council-chamber; where warm expostulations and most bitter reproaches passed in the Queen's hearing between the falling minister, the Lord Chancellor, and Lord Bolingbroke. These contentious were carried on in the royal presence on the night of the 27th of July, till two o'clock the following morning. The following day (July 28th), another council was held; but nothing could be fixed upon as to the successor to the Earl of Oxford. A third cabinet council was appointed to be held the next day, but was adjourned on account of her Majesty's indisposition, which she herself imputed to the fatigue and disturbance this affair had created; she intimating the same to her physicians and nearest attendants, and adding that "she should hardly outlive it."

CHAPTER X.

THE poor Queen was now very ill, the physicians and surgeons summoned, and a privy council called; to which the Dukes of Somerset and Argyle went uninvited, they claiming their privilege as privy councillors; others followed their example in quick succession; Bolingbroke and Mrs. Masham were outmarched by their opponents: the Queen was dead; and the council was seized by a strong majority of adherents of the house of Hanoyer; and from this moment-down went the prospects of the Pretender.

Immediate steps were at once taken for the security of the cities of London and Westminster, even two days before the Queen's death; and orders were given to the heralds at arms, and the Life Guards (for the Queen might die at any moment), to be in readiness to mount at the first warning, in order to proclaim the Elector of Hanover, King of Great Britain; and as Portsmouth had been left in a defenceless state (perhaps on purpose), six hundred men, out-pensioners of Chelsea Hospital, were marched there under Colonel Pocock, and such half-pay officers as were at hand; Brigadier Whetham was ordered off to Scotland; and the same day the fleet was placed under the command of the Earl of Berkeley.

Her Majesty expired on the 1st of August, in the fiftieth year of her age; a good woman as wife, mother, and queen; but-yet not a woman of a strong mind-No! she was a weak-minded woman, the prey of bad, designing men. While all this was going on at court, Dr. Jonathan Swift was skulking off to Reading, in Berk. shire, till the Queen should die, and be buried; when he further skulked to Ireland, to his deanery of St. Patrick's, the proceeds of his iniquity; where he remained for the remainder of his life.

De Foe, in his Appeal to Honour and Justice, affirms, "that no sooner was the Queen dead, and the King, as right required, pro